I build things

Hey there,

This is the VIG blog. I'm Troy. I've been building with AI since early 2023. Before that — chatbot experiments, prompt engineering, image gen, the usual stuff.

My journey started with a flagship project; an AI-powered chatroom-style forum where we attempted to simulate 'collective consciousness' as a method of guiding group collaboration, like a tool to help people find a 'universal consensus' and untapped potential between their ideas.

It wasn't really about "building the next big thing" — more like "how do we design a system that can capture the collective essence of 1000 totally unique insights, and turn that essence into something useful."

It started out as a private research tool, and I hired a freelance developer to help me build it. Later, it turned into a public novel AI experiment in 2023, and soon became a personal obsession that dragged me into a chaotic, strategic pursuit of AI fluency. The experiment ran for a full year before retiring the beta.

Development of the 'Universal Mind' (Kairo) is ongoing, and has since spawned an array of exciting applications. It's an unruly, but useful arsenal, and I'm working daily to bring it all together — when I'm not at my day-job, developing other applications or consulting on AI projects.

Why I build things / Philosophy

I'm a neurodivergent entrepreneur who grew up with Tourette syndrome. I struggle with math, but I thrive in patterns and maps. That combo means I've spent most of my life thinking about thinking — how the brain works, why people operate the way they do, what systems designed for humans should look like. AI gave me the ability to build on all of that instead of just theorizing.

I teach myself everything, and I learn by doing, so the AI revolution was a very real dream come true for me. I've taken only one college course, from Harvard, "Disruptive Innovation", taught by the late Clay Christenson, with admiration for his book, "The Innovator's Dilemma", which I recommend to anyone). My semi-formal coursework and research areas are AI Project Management, Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, and Sales Psychology/Training.

I've been writing blueprints for the past two years in anticipation of Agentic AI, or in other words, while I waited for larger context windows, and significantly more accurate AI code-writing agents.

I often disagree with the way systems are designed. I'm just incredibly picky. Unintuitive UI brings me physical pain and I can't stand it when I come to rely on someone else's platform, tools, or software, only to be blindsided by an update that ruins almost everything that made me love using it — especially if I was willing to pay for it.

That's why I build things. I know what I need, and now, I can build it better myself. That actually sums it up.

Local-Sovereign AI, Openclaw revolution, and my AI Insights

Computer-use agents 'arrived' late 2025, and I went all-in. I spent months boot-camping myself, day and night, in order to understand the full architecture of 'Clawdbot' (later 'Moltbot', then 'Openclaw'...). It wasn't long before I started building my own agentic systems from scratch. Shout out to Peter Steinberger. I hope everyone realizes how long the general public would have been left in the dust without him.

The architecture was always there, but architecture that exists and architecture that's accessible are two completely different things. Peter built the bridge between those two states and changed the access timeline for an entire class of builders who the traditional pipeline would have excluded. Without Openclaw, we would have been waiting years for that capability to trickle down through commercial products that we would be dependent on rather than building from.

My day one goal was to replace my dependency on cloud providers in every possible capacity. I succeeded, it was just as painful as it sounds. I continue making them even better every day, and VIG agents are now producing polished results. The recent Claude Code Source leak is is going to incredibly valuable in the coming weeks. I feel terrible for Anthropic, but the whole world is pitching in now.

The demand is undeniable: We all want powerful Agentic, local AI that can run on consumer grade hardware.

In the long term, it's my belief that Sovereign systems are key to our survival and resilience. Sovereign means you have the choice: Local data, cloud-inference when it makes sense, and local-inference when it doesn't. The point isn't to reject modern infrastructure — it's to stop being dependent and lean into sustainable infrastructure.

Your internet goes down? Your tools still work. A provider changes their pricing? You're not scrambling. An API gets deprecated? That's ok, because your system doesn't need an API to do the job you hired it for.

That's my idea of good engineering.

It's my first article, so I'll keep it light, but I look forward to talking more with you about why local-first, Sovereign systems are going to be so crazy important to everyone as the future unfolds.

VIG products start local, as an ideology, so that we are always designing with first principles in mind. Every project will be different. I build a custom solution for almost every component of every project.

Hope you enjoy our work and future products.

-Troy

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